Buddhism stems from the Greek Buddus, "to stretch", and Menos "the ear." Siddhārtha Gautama, the founder of Buddhism, wore large ear plugs before he became a monk. These stretched his ears, or Buddus his Menos. Over time this was abbreviated Buddus his M, and eventually just Buddhism.

how can you walk around when your limbless? shouldn't that be 'you're rolling around limbless with your brain leaking out'? I'm pretty sure with 4 stubs you can still get some momentum going to roll over and over- just avoid puddles and piles of poo.

oh, and hills too.

Logged

Because I can,also because I don't care what you want.XBL: OriginalCeeKayWii U: CeeKay

So it can be said for Buddhism, Zen Buddhism(yes, there is a difference), Tao, Shinto, Confucianism, Satanism even. Name your "religion", it's a crutch.

Seriously, I find that many people use their religion as a crutch. They believe they can continually "ask and receive forgiveness" rather than take responsibility for their actions (or lack thereof). Many use it as a cop-out - a self delusional attempt to excuse their "sins". Some even attribute their sins to Satan (or another malevolent being of supposed influence). As such, some are never critical enough of themselves to analyze their own actions in order to prevent it from happening again. "Sorry I had an affair. I was led astray and ask forgiveness." No, you stuck your dick into a hooker. Own up to it.

It's also used to justify and promote a sense of superiority. The sense of being better than someone due to the God you (supposedly) worship has been a common theme throughout history. You see evidence of this all the time in public, but it's far more overt in private. Hell, the whole "family values" line from the Republicans is a thinly veiled euphemism for Christianity, as if non-Christians don't have values or can't hold together a family. But it's not just Christians...virtually every religion has the "believe in us or you go to Hell" clause. Judaism certainly does. So does Islam. By fostering that sense of inclusion and superiority, joined with the "forgiveness" which lets people avoid responsibility for their actions, and joined with the fear of not belonging (go to Hell, outcast), religions have created powerful mental barriers to prevent members from leaving or even rationally analyzing their purpose.

Seriously, I find that many people use their religion as a crutch. They believe they can continually "ask and receive forgiveness" rather than take responsibility for their actions (or lack thereof). Many use it as a cop-out - a self delusional attempt to excuse their "sins". Some even attribute their sins to Satan (or another malevolent being of supposed influence). As such, some are never critical enough of themselves to analyze their own actions in order to prevent it from happening again. "Sorry I had an affair. I was led astray and ask forgiveness." No, you stuck your dick into a hooker. Own up to it.

It's also used to justify and promote a sense of superiority. The sense of being better than someone due to the God you (supposedly) worship has been a common theme throughout history. You see evidence of this all the time in public, but it's far more overt in private. Hell, the whole "family values" line from the Republicans is a thinly veiled euphemism for Christianity, as if non-Christians don't have values or can't hold together a family. But it's not just Christians...virtually every religion has the "believe in us or you go to Hell" clause. Judaism certainly does. So does Islam. By fostering that sense of inclusion and superiority, joined with the "forgiveness" which lets people avoid responsibility for their actions, and joined with the fear of not belonging (go to Hell, outcast), religions have created powerful mental barriers to prevent members from leaving or even rationally analyzing their purpose.

Ok since I let the cat out of the bag...one more response on the subject from a more practical frame of refreence.

I think faith can free people from fear, hate, and create a belief in something greater than yourself. If you think about it, to go to the stars, or evolve on any meaningful level as a species we need to channel our faith to acccomplsih these tasks. Without it we are just going through our daily motions, no hope of anything greater, and a real risk of being pulled down into something truly ugly and regretable. Faith in something greater, makes the impossible, possible.

Ok since I let the cat out of the bag...one more response on the subject from a more practical frame of refreence.

I think faith can free people from fear, hate, and create a belief in something greater than yourself. If you think about it, to go to the stars, or evolve on any meaningful level as a species we need to channel our faith to acccomplsih these tasks. Without it we are just going through our daily motions, no hope of anything greater, and a real risk of being pulled down into something truly ugly and regretable. Faith in something greater, makes the impossible, possible.

People say religion is a crutch as if this is a bad thing. A crutch is an instrument of utility, to help one balance themselves and compensate for a lack of mobility. I might argue religion is a crutch, just as... a computer is a crutch in the work place, or a car is a crutch of traveling.

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Here is my thought on religion...

The human brain has a finite cognitive ability for calculating social permutations. Some understand this limitation as the 150 rule.

Most simply, the 150 rule says that a collective operates most efficiently in numbers of 150 or less. The reasoning for this is that the human brain allocates a finite number of "channels" for cognitive thinking as it pertains to relationships. When your life has two people, your brain needs to account not only for two relationships (e.g., you and each of the two people), but also must relate the relationship between the other two, contextualized as it pertains to yourself. So as you can imagine, adding one more person does not just add one more permutation to account for, but many. The limit seems to be around 150 people. This is just one of the many limits the human brain has, such as the number of digits your short term memory is capable of storing before remembering becomes hard (brain age anyone?).

This is why collectives of larger than 150 start to experience much more informal social interactions, which are much more superficial, inefficient, and disorganized. Members of the collective start to not recognize one another, communication begins to falter. Basically, you lose that tight-knit feeling. This loss of efficiency and organization is especially critical when a collective is to perform specialized tasks collaboratively, such as a military unit.

Think of it in terms of your family. Let's say that you have a very large extended family that contains 150 people. You guys are fine -- you support each other, and acting morally is incentivized because acting immorally towards members of your collective now directly affects your immediate environment and quality-of-life. Raping your hot cousin or stealing your dad's slice of pie may come back to haunt you in a very tangible way.

Now, as a second case study, let's hypothesize that we're living in a collective of 5,000 members. The living is now very informal. In this situation, favoring an individualistic philosophy is now beneficial, as raping unknown women and mugging Joe Schmo increases your tangible wealth and quality-of-life. You are now unaccountable for your actions, due to the informality of interactions in this society.

This is why religion is such a necessity, whether you believe in the matter-of-fact truth to its narrative or not. It acts as an altruistic foundation from which morality is created, making it a very grand and complex social hierarchy. This provides rationale (albeit sometimes fantastical) for your actions, and incentivizes certain behaviors (again, often fantastically), allowing your collective to not destroy itself from the inside out. Complex social hierarchies are necessary when working with collectives of more than 150 member. For example, a corporation uses a hierarchy of supervisors, managers, vice presidents, presidents, and so on, and is governed by corporate policies much like a primative civilization is governed by religious tenets. A military has standard military rankings. Imagine these large groups without these complex social hierarchies. They would operate so inefficiently that their cost of operation would exceed their utility.

To me, this chaos is what humanity without religion represents. I would even venture to say that humanity and religion are one and the same, because I think neither would exist without the other. Religion seems to be the difference between humans and other animals, and seems to accounts for why the propagation of the human species is so successful while other species are not. This may also account for why every large civilization always innately possesses its own form of religion or spirituality (though smaller tribes of less than 150 sometimes do not, and need not), because there might never have been the civilization without the religion. The civilization would probably have collapsed on itself in chaos.

So to me, religion is a crutch. But without this aid, the human race would be Christopher Reeves wriggling on the horse track.

Common ground is one thing, but when you have a herd of buffalo running because "everyone else is doing it" it doesn't make that child who gets trampled to death any less dead.

The idea of heirarchy and accomplishing "greater good" can be done without the skewed and biased views of history and creation; these precepts and the discrepancies and differing ideologies have been the cause of some of the greatest man-made tragedies to date. If we were all to lose the idea of god, and instead create a perfect vision of humankind and strive towards it we would be no further behind. Acceptance of shortcomings doesn't mean someone named God gives you carte blanche to "rape your cousin" and then say sorry afterwards, because hey, the social structure you've accepted happens to be the one with the all-forgiveness clause.

And if religion is a crutch; that crutch has now outlived it's usefulness. The assistance in mobility may have been necessary, but I think we're at a point where we need to work on balancing without aid and get ourselves righted. This in no way dismisses God or the belief in such; it should no longer be a fundemental part of our cultural structure.

Logged

"If it weren't for Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of television, we'd still be eating frozen radio dinners." - Johnny Carson

Yah, I guess if you want to zoom out to see the entire planet rival the size of a pin head, and then get your biggest brush possible.

Belief systems are ultimately not there to herd the masses; they are just used to control them. Beliefs in God are no different than that of the boogieman; I'd better listen to the authority or something's gonna get me.

Matt Damon's char. spit out a line that says it best:Organized religion destroys who we are by inhibiting our actions... by inhibiting our decisions, out of... out of fear of some... some intangible parent figure who... who shakes a finger at us from thousands of years ago and says... and says, "Do it - Do it and I'll fuckin' spank you. "

Logged

"If it weren't for Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of television, we'd still be eating frozen radio dinners." - Johnny Carson

Sure, you can look at religion in that way - but we could look at nationalism in the same way.

Religion is nationalism merged with moral code of conduct. hornysax, typing that name felt mildy violating, but the arguement you presented was actually something I had not previously heard or considered! I find myself keenly interested in the premise and research for this arguement. Is there a book I can read with supporting research? I'd love to understand this in a greater context

But so is Budhism, Islam, Philosophy, Logic, the theory of Evolution, Scientology, Atheism, Belief in human intellect or goodness, etc, etc, etc

Any system that humans use to attempt to understand how we got here, why we're here, how do we make sense of the world, and how do we respond to things such as pain, death and evil acts around us can all be defined as a crutch. They each provide a framework to that mere 10% of our brain that we use so that we can make sense of the world around us.

The real issue is that we're all cripples and that we all use crutches (whether we want to admit it or not).

But so is Budhism, Islam, Philosophy, Logic, the theory of Evolution, Scientology, Atheism, Belief in human intellect or goodness, etc, etc, etc

Any system that humans use to attempt to understand how we got here, why we're here, how do we make sense of the world, and how do we respond to things such as pain, death and evil acts around us can all be defined as a crutch. They each provide a framework to that mere 10% of our brain that we use so that we can make sense of the world around us.

The real issue is that we're all cripples and that we all use crutches (whether we want to admit it or not).

You might say religion is a crutch because when life sucks, you use it to hold you up. When someone dies, you use it to make yourself feel better about them dying. When you can't stop doing meth it's because your god made you like that. Etc.

How many wars have been ignited by Shinto, Buddhism, and Confucianism?

It's an honest question, my knowledge of eastern history is pretty bad. I would think you spark fewer wars with religions that don't require other religions to be wrong. I would also think that organized religion doesn't ignite as much hate and dehumanizing when its primary focus is peace and harmony.

How many wars have been ignited by Shinto, Buddhism, and Confucianism?

I specifically recall examples coming up in history when I was in college for Buddhism and violence. I couldn't recall specifcs so I did a quick search. I'll agree eastern religions tend be more passive, and thus harder to justify violence. However anything organized and managed by man has the ability to be co-opted for greed, pride, and personal gain.

I think one factor is that eastern religions don't seem to be mutually exclusive. So they aren't trying to win converts by saying everyone who doesn't practice their flavor of religion is going to a burning hell.

If I had to guess, because the require a certain amount of faith in order for you to accept. You can unequivically prove Evolution, since we have no data, no records of preman civilization. Philosophy is pretty much the same way. I'm not sure how logic fits here though, logic is all about measuable outcome, sure it often exclude the improprable and unlikely till proven otherwise, but it is measuable

I think one factor is that eastern religions don't seem to be mutually exclusive. So they aren't trying to win converts by saying everyone who doesn't practice their flavor of religion is going to a burning hell.

Exactly. Using Japan as an example, most of the population considers themselves both Shinto and Buddhist, and Christian weddings are becoming very popular.

But so is Budhism, Islam, Philosophy, Logic, the theory of Evolution, Scientology, Atheism, Belief in human intellect or goodness, etc, etc, etc

Any system that humans use to attempt to understand how we got here, why we're here, how do we make sense of the world, and how do we respond to things such as pain, death and evil acts around us can all be defined as a crutch. They each provide a framework to that mere 10% of our brain that we use so that we can make sense of the world around us.

The real issue is that we're all cripples and that we all use crutches (whether we want to admit it or not).

You might say religion is a crutch because when life sucks, you use it to hold you up. When someone dies, you use it to make yourself feel better about them dying. When you can't stop doing meth it's because your god made you like that. Etc.

Close - but actually i think it's more that any of those belief systems are what hold you up when extreme issues like you listed occur.

So really it's more a matter of is your specific crutch strong enough to keep you going when shit happens.

It's when a persons crutch can't support them any longer that they crumble

How many wars have been ignited by Shinto, Buddhism, and Confucianism?

It's an honest question, my knowledge of eastern history is pretty bad. I would think you spark fewer wars with religions that don't require other religions to be wrong. I would also think that organized religion doesn't ignite as much hate and dehumanizing when its primary focus is peace and harmony.

I would agree with you that the issue is when people believe that their 'crutch' is the only right one and then try and force it on other people.

It's offensive when Christians do it, but equally offensive when others do it as well.

If I had to guess, because the require a certain amount of faith in order for you to accept. You can unequivically prove Evolution, since we have no data, no records of preman civilization. Philosophy is pretty much the same way. I'm not sure how logic fits here though, logic is all about measuable outcome, sure it often exclude the improprable and unlikely till proven otherwise, but it is measuable

I put logic in there because I've known far too many people in real life (and I believe in this forum) who seem to put their "faith" in what they believe is their "superior intellectual capacity" -- much like Vizzini from the Princess Bride